Why Harper is cracking the whip — and why he has to

That’s how easy it has been for the media to characterize the prime minister’s response to the mini-revolt among some Conservative backbenchers over their right to discuss the abortion issue when and however they wish in the House of Commons.

The editorialists have weighed in mightily. “Parliament is diminished,” thunders the Toronto Star, and National Post columnist Andrew Coyne’s head has exploded twice in one week over the outrage — possibly a new record. He described the prime minister’s actions as “contemptuous,” “mindless,” “frightened,” an “abuse of power,” “shameful,” and “autocratic.”

Given Stephen Harper’s popular perception as a “notorious control freak,” as the Star put it, it’s has been all too easy to see the prime minister as “suppressing dissent at every turn,” denigrating democracy and abrogating the right of MPs to speak for their constituents through “PMO heavy-handed manipulation.”

How soon they forget.

From the early days of the Reform Party in the 1990s, through the subsequent Reform-Alliance period and even after the formation of the new Conservative Party in December, 2003, a combination of unrestrained populism and ill-advised public comments by MPs on a variety of issues made Canada’s centre-right party the object of ridicule. These comments ultimately coalesced to become a huge barrier to Reform, then the Alliance and finally the Conservatives, ever being elected as a national government.

For the sake of those too young to remember, it is useful to dust off just some of those nuggets:

Store owners should be free to ask gays and ethnics to move “to the back of the shop” or even fire them if their presence offended another customer;

It would be acceptable for homosexuals to be denied the right to teach;

Official bilingualism should be abolished, or at the very least, reduced in scope;

Each time one of these gaffes emerged, the media rejoiced at their great good luck for having been given another object of derision, and the editorials repeatedly called on the party leadership to get control of the backbench, stop what the media came to call “bimbo eruptions” and stop scaring the voters. Otherwise, the party would never see government.

While Preston Manning and Stockwell Day both worked to tone down the offside rhetoric, it fell to Stephen Harper to complete the job of instilling discipline in the ranks. From the time he decided that the old PC party and Reform-Alliance needed to be put back together to prevent perpetual Liberal government until the end of time, he had a number of strategic policy as well as organizational objectives.

An early priority was to bring clarity and coherence to party policy on such key issues as health care, and he laboured long and hard to reposition the party. Gone was the insistence that medicare already contained key elements of two-tiers and the argument that it would probably benefit from even more, replaced by a completely orthodox endorsement of the basic architecture of the Canadian health care system as Canadians know and love it, warts and all.

Each time one of these gaffes emerged, the media rejoiced at their great good luck for having been given another object of derision, and the editorials repeatedly called on the party leadership to get control of the backbench …

Other adjustments to policy would have to wait. When the 2004 election was called, the new Conservative Party was just five months old, and had not yet held a policy conference to confirm its basic positions.

As a result, 2004 became the “Harper hidden agenda” election and Paul Martin and the Liberals played it for all it was worth. In the absence of a clear statement of policy principles adopted by the party in convention, Martin was able to repeatedly remind voters about all of the unfortunate past positions expressed by Reform and Reform-Alliance MPs, and allege that they were all just waiting there to burst forth as policy or legislation upon the election of a Harper government.

Throughout the campaign, the Liberals pounded away on abortion, suggesting that because the Conservatives could not produce a policy resolution ruling it out, there was a real possibility that once in office, they would attempt to limit women’s right to choose. Internal party polling pretty well confirmed the success of this fearmongering in the final weekend before the vote, specifically in the 905 region around Toronto.

There really wasn’t a lot that Harper and the party could do to counteract this attack, and the leader was further damaged during the campaign by three more backbench “eruptions”:

The questioning of the future of official bilingualism;

The comparison of abortion to the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg in Iraq; and

Public musing by a front-bencher about using the notwithstanding clause to protect the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman: “to heck with the courts.”

After the election, some media speculated that these ill-timed comments might actually have cost the Conservatives electoral success. While that was a bit far-fetched, it was clear that the backbench had once again sabotaged the central campaign with their outbursts, reminding Canadians that Conservatives had, at worst, a hidden agenda — or at best an unclear one.

Harper and his campaign team conducted an exhaustive and brutally frank post-mortem of all aspects of the 2004 campaign: organizational preparedness, policy, platform, day-to-day campaign scripting, polling, advertising, debates, communications and candidate involvement. On the latter, he subsequently put his caucus on notice that in future, he would happily remove the nomination of anyone seriously embarrassing the party during a campaign, even if it cost him a seat.

In the wake of the election, the issue of abortion (as well as several other hot-button issues) was finally put to bed, when the party voted not to reopen the question at its March 2005 policy conference in Montreal. Mr. Harper insisted that a Conservative government would not reopen the abortion debate. As he put it yet again in April 2011: “The government will not bring forward any such legislation, and any such legislation that is brought forward will be defeated as long as I am prime minister.”

All of this provides some much-needed context to the prime minister’s sensitivities on MPs making comments that question party principles, stray from clearly-stated policy directions or wander off with outlandish commentary. Mr. Harper already has the T-shirt, because he knows what such self-indulgence cost his party in the past.

Since the Harper government took office, each time the proponents of limits on abortion have brought forward another motion or initiative, the response from the other side has been predictable: the Harper-haters tune up the fear machine and raise the spectre of women being denied the right to choose. And to Harper’s critics, the very fact of a Conservative MP raising the abortion issue is proof of the prime minister’s connivance. As the NDP’s Niki Ashton put it in the House last spring: “If the prime minister didn’t want a woman’s right to choose to be debated, we wouldn’t be here tonight.”

So the prime minister is caught. If he ‘allows’ even the discussion of abortion, he has a ‘Trojan horse agenda’ … If he shuts it all down, he is a tyrant …

So the prime minister is caught. If he “allows” even the discussion of abortion, he has a “Trojan horse agenda,” as Ashton so objectively describes it. If he shuts it all down, he is a tyrant, preventing the expression of constituents’ views by their MPs.

Of the many issues that divide Canadians, it is hard to find one more difficult than abortion. On both sides, proponents are equally motivated by belief, values and passion. That’s all fine, but the problem is that at the extremes, both sides see abortion as a zero sum game, in which the only way they can “win” is by utterly defeating the other. Thus, discussion of any limit on abortion is seen by the other extreme as a comprehensive attack on the right to choose. There’s not much room for rational discussion there.

The final question is whether the prime minister’s shutting down of the abortion debate is an affront to the ability of MPs to represent the views of constituents in Parliament.

The governance of party caucuses in the House of Commons requires a deft hand. It involves a delicate balance between individual MPs’ right to self-expression on behalf of their constituents and the need for cohesion and coherence on major policies and party principles. Achieving this balance becomes even more challenging when public policy confronts religious and/or moral values and ethical beliefs.

The prime minister believes he has a social compact with the Canadian people on the issue of abortion. I expect he also would argue that Conservative MPs knew full well the stated policy of the party on this issue when they offered themselves for election, so they should not be surprised that he is cracking the whip now. He also believes there are a score of other issues worthy of parliamentary time that have greater value and will be more productive for the country, its people and the economy.

In addition, as the CBC’s Chris Hall noted last week, there is an element of hypocrisy in the complaints of the dissidents about muzzling, given their heavenly-choir repetition of PMO talking points in the past.

In the final analysis, I expect the prime minister has decided to let the Canadian people be the final arbiter on the abortion issue. They are pretty clear. A January 2013 Angus Reid reported on current Canadian attitudes on abortion. The results are instructive:

44 per cent say abortions should be permitted in all cases;

23 per cent say abortion should be permitted, but subject to greater restrictions than now;

18 per cent say it should only be permitted in cases of rape, incest and to save a woman’s life;

4 per cent say abortion should only be permitted to save a woman’s life;

5 per cent say abortion should never be permitted; and

59 per cent say there is no point in reopening the abortion debate right now.

There may be a rational debate about abortion in Parliament someday, but I doubt it. In the meantime, the extremists of both sides on this issue can all come down and take a bow. Well done!

In the way you have conducted yourselves on this issue both inside and outside of Parliament, with your scorpions-in-a-bottle approach and your corrosive winner-take-all strategies, and by never missing an opportunity to project the most negative of partisan motives on the intentions of the other side, you have successfully convinced the Canadian people that we are not collectively capable as a country of having a rational discussion on this issue.

It’s a pretty sad commentary on us all.

Geoff Norquay is a Principal with the Earnscliffe Strategy Group. In 2004-05, he was director of communications to then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper. Between 1981 and 1984, he served as director of research for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and from 1984 to 1988 in a variety of senior policy advisory capacities in the Prime Minister’s Office of the Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.